


Living a Lie

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 17:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10791378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: It's not just Elliot. Ali's whole life has been a lie.





	Living a Lie

Emily didn’t understand. How could she? She’d grown up with Pam and Wayne Fields, the average family. She’d taken Ali at face value when Ali had talked about her life with Elliot Rollins, or Archer Dunhill, being when she was living a lie. She couldn’t understand what it had been like for Ali realising that she had been living a lie for so much of her life, and that she had seen Rollins as finally being the chance to have a future without it.

When Alison looked back now, she couldn’t understand how she could have been so smug, and enjoyed the drama, after she found out by accident that Peter Hastings was Jason’s real father, how she could have dropped all those hints about him to Grandma D so she would cut Jason out of her will, how she’d hidden that money of his and planted Peter’s letters where she knew he would find them once he went looking for it. She could understand it better now, how he must have felt in that moment of reading the letters and finally finding out he wasn’t who he thought he was, that his parents had been lying to him all along.

No one knew about the moment when it had occurred to Ali to wonder whether Kenneth was her real father or whether she was Peter’s too, about the times she’d spent scrutinising the family albums, or pictures of her and Spencer, trying to work out who she actually resembled. Sometimes, she would laugh at herself, thinking she saw Kenneth DiLaurentis’s features in her face, but other times she would freeze as the doubt crept in again.

Then there was Charlotte. For the beginning of Alison’s life, she had been raised as the youngest of three, and then Charles was gone, vanished behind the walls of Radley, all photographs removed from sight, so well hidden that Jason was genuinely convinced for most of his life that he had an imaginary friend? And over something so much smaller than Kenneth had claimed? And her mother…keeping up the lies for all those years, pretending to Kenneth that “Charles” had died whilst visiting Charlotte all along….

Charlotte hadn’t even been honest herself when she had come back into Alison’s life. If she had gone to Jason and Alison when she first got out of Radley and told them who she really was, instead of creating the fake persona of Cece Drake, Alison had asked herself so many times how she would have reacted to that. But she thought now that she would have accepted Charlotte as her sister, formed a relationship with her that wasn’t based entirely on lies. Jason’s relationship with her would have also been better at the end, without that whole weird dynamic of their dating history.

Then just as she was accepting Charlotte as her sister, had come the discovery that actually, Charlotte had been her cousin, the child of Mary Drake, the identical twin that no one had known Jessica had…Had Charlotte known? That day when Charlotte had first told Alison she was her sister, it still felt to Alison like that was what she had believed at the time. And yet she had used Mary’s surname when introducing herself to Alison and Jason, which couldn’t surely be a coincidence, and now Alison was never going to get the chance to find out exactly how long Charlotte had known.

Spencer, out of everyone, would be the most likely to understand what Ali was going through, having just found out herself that Mary Drake was her real mother, making her Ali’s cousin, but Ali knew it wasn’t the right time to push her on that right now. How was it that it had never come out up to now? With Spencer and Alison having become best friends, the families couldn’t avoid seeing each other…how must Jessica have felt, seeing Spencer Hastings every day and knowing that she was the product of Mary’s attempt to get revenge? Or Veronica, unable to shut the door on the DiLaurentis family because she had to see Alison all the time, and therefore the whole family?

Alison now wondered if the way she had controlled her friends, the way she had written that fake letter to Paige from Emily just to make sure that Paige never took her place in Emily’s life, the way she’d kept promising to hook Aria up with Noel knowing she had no intention of it or the way she’d held her knowledge of Byron’s affair over her, that time she’d told Spencer it was neck and neck between her and Andrew Campbell for president of the class and she’d fix it for her when in reality Alison had no clue how close it was, and when she’d called Hanna Hefty Hanna and encouraged her to binge…had that been a way of having something to control in her life when she couldn’t control everything else? Or had it been as she had always thought, a way of making sure there were people out there she would always come first with? Alison didn’t even know any more. And when she thought back on some of the things she had said and done, she genuinely wondered whether she was really any better.

When she had first met the man she knew as Elliot Rollins, Alison had finally seen a chance to get away from the past, from all the lies told to her by her family members, from the way everyone around her had always seen her as a liar. He would be her fresh start, the chance to turn her back on Alison DiLaurentis and be Alison Rollins, someone who wasn’t defined by her past.

Except he had turned out not even to be Elliot Rollins at all, and Alison was beginning to feel that she would never get the chance to break away from being lied to.


End file.
